(Very Very) Visible Horse

Nooooope. Nope nope nope nope. You go on ahead. I’m looking away now. I’m hiding in a blanket fort from whatever this is going to be.

The 8 Strangest Things You Can Buy at My Yard Sale

It’s finally happening: I’m turning the camera around, and focusing on some of the weird stuff that I’m selling at my own yard sale. Hoisting myself by my own petard, as they say! Slipping on my own banana peel! Dropping an anvil on myself! I think the metaphor got away from me…

Anyway as you know we moved, and we did the thing that smart people do: shipped the entirety of our worldly possessions cross-country, and then decided to cull it down a bit, after realizing we couldn’t physically fit the amount of crap we’ve amassed over the years into our new house. (This is probably Lizo’s fault, since I never amass large piles of garbage.) It was either annex our neighbors’ property—which they seemed patently unwilling to agree to—or have a yard sale of our own.

This is what our yard sale looked like right after we’d finished setting it up. For comparison, here’s a shot I took at the end of the day:

As you can see, it would be exaggerating to say that business was good. It would also be exaggerating to say that any business happened at all.

We did have one customer, Bob, who was nice enough to give our weird collection of goods a once-over, all the while providing a colorful running commentary. “Those wooden spoons should be good for spankings!” he told me. “Yeahhhhh!!” (The way he said it sounded like he didn’t mean for misbehaving children.)

Then, as he was looking over some recipe books, there was “Vegetarian cooking?? That’s what FOOD eats! Ewwwwww!!” He actually said “eww” like that, like a child discovering belly-button lint. Later, as we were ringing up his purchases: “I’ll take the knives. …I need to go back and get dressed first, though.” (It’s at this point I should mention that he was wearing a pair of rubber overalls, with both of the straps down, and nothing else.) Bob was great. Things got a little awkward though when someone mentioned the Amy Winehouse documentary, and Bob muttered “another dead druggie.”

Oh, Bob.

Bob wasn’t our only customer, but he was one of maybe a dozen—most of which were neighbors who were out walking their dogs and wondering why we had the entire contents of a Sam Goody circa 2002 dumped out on our driveway. We were asked “did you guys advertise?” at least a half-dozen times, with “because I had no idea this was even happening” politely left unspoken. Then around 11:30, we had a freak thunderstorm (the first rain we’ve seen since moving here) and most of our stuff got water-logged. It was not a very good sale.

Where did we go wrong? Well for one, the house we’re renting is on a peninsula with a population smaller than my high school’s graduating class, so any yard sale we had here was doomed to failure. I guess in hindsight, too, I wish I hadn’t called out “early birds”—those people who show up before your scheduled start time—in my Craigslist ad like I did:

Also, our sign didn’t make it through the rain so good.

All-in-all I sort of hate yard sales now, so this is the end of the blog forever.

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Okay I lied. Here’s a sampling of some of the weird stuff we tried to sell to Bob!

A Bouquet of Black Roses and Spiders!

This was from a yardsale that appeared to be the entire contents of a Spirit Halloween store—except that they were selling everything for like, a dollar. Spooky holiday lights? A dollar. Masks so terrifying that I heard a little kid whispering “I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here…”? A dollar. The bouquet above?

TEN CENTS. TEN FRIGGIN’ CENTS. Skeletons the size of ME cost $5, and that was seriously the most expensive thing they had.  As someone who unironically lists “decorating for the holidays” as an interest on Facebook, I was SO into it.

A few other choice finds:

Don’t Get Up

A dollar-store skeleton buried in dirt from your backyard in some old tupperware? I’ll take all you have, thank you.

Nobody Loves You, Re-seller

Today, we bring you a SPECIAL REPORT, from what is being hailed as “Connecticut’s Largest Yardsale”! When I saw the sign, I just had to go. I had no idea we even had one of those!

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…Yeah, it turns out we don’t—if anything it was more like “Connecticut’s Most Moderately-Sized Flea Market.” (Which, granted, probably wouldn’t have fit on the sign.) And if I’m not funny today, you can blame that, because if you’re expecting a ginormous yardsale and all you get is a bunch of people selling pieces of garbage they glued together, you’re basically gonna be Grumpy Cat for the rest of the day.

Why? Allow me to explain in like a million words.